The Workers' Corporatist industrial relations system: labor law and rights at the Labor Courts between the Brazilian Democratic and Dictatorial Regimes (1953-1978)

Much of the historiography dedicated to the Brazilian system of corporatist industrial relations has focused on the intellectual thinking of its creators, emphasizing the corporatism's original authoritarian and controlling character and minimizing its praxis. In this sense, many studies end up in silencing the role of the workers and trade unions in the process of shaping the corporatist system, especially during the democratic period of 1945-1964. This article aims to contribute to the debates on corporatist systems by emphasizing the importance of the workers' experience based on the narrow relation to the labor institutes (Labor Courts, trade unions, and the Ministry of Labor). By doing so, this paper aims to show how the workers were successful in given new meaning to the corporatist project. Besides, it calls attention to the making of a new political labor culture strongly based on the working-class struggle for labor rights. This study will analyze the uses of the corporatism by the working-class in two different political regimes: in the "populist" period (1950s and early 1960s) and the military dictatorial period, from 1964 on.